Data from: Quantifying global drivers of zoonotic bat viruses: a process-based perspective

Emerging infectious diseases (EIDs), particularly zoonoses, represent a
significant threat to global health. Emergence is often driven by
anthropogenic activity (e.g. travel, land use change). Although disease
emergence frameworks suggest multiple steps from initial zoonotic
transmission to human-to-human spread, there have been few attempts to
empirically model specific steps. We create a process-basedframework to
separate out components of individual emergence steps. We focus on early
emergence and expand the first step, zoonotic transmission, into processes
of generation of pathogen richness, transmission opportunity and
establishment, each with their own hypothesised drivers. Using this
structure, we build a spatial empirical model of these drivers, taking bat
viruses shared with humans as a case study. We show that drivers of both
pathogen richness (host diversity and climatic variability) and
transmission opportunity (human population density, bushmeat hunting and
livestock production) are associated with virus sharing between humans and
bats. We also show spatial heterogeneity between the global patterns of
these two processes, suggesting high priority locations for pathogen
discovery and surveillance in wildlife may not necessarily coincide with
those for public health intervention. Finally, we offer direction for
future studies of zoonotic EIDs by highlighting the importance of the
processes underlying their emergence.